Pixar Boosts Invasion of English Roses by Author Austin

By Hephzibah Anderson -
Dec 9, 2012

There is a piece of Pixar studios in
California that is forever England, thanks to Steve Jobs and the
British flower expert David Austin.

The late Apple founder chose to line the driveway with
English roses named Constance Spry -- a pink, myrrh-scented
climber bred by Austin. The grower has created more than 200
flowers, though they all owe their existence to the lowly spud.

Austin was just four years old when he persuaded his
grandmother to let him plant a few potatoes on the edge of a
field hidden by a hedge.

“I was so keen,” he recalls. “She gave me a patch in the
garden. It kept expanding.” It’s still growing more than 80
years later.

Ditching tubers for roses, Austin transformed his
grandparents’ Shropshire farm into the hub of a multinational
operation. He is now 86 years old, still trying to combine the
fragrance and shrubby growth of old roses with the color range
and repeat-flowering stamina of modern varieties.

His blooms go as far afield as Bhutan and Russia. Constance
Spry was his first hit back in 1961, and it typifies the traits
he breeds for -- traits he sums up in a single word: charm.

“You either know it or you don’t,” he says.

We’re sitting in his wood-paneled living room with Michael
Marriott, the company’s head rosarian and technical manager of
30 years. The weather is aptly English, birdsong drifting in
from the sodden show garden where petals scatter the lawn.

Thorny Trials

Breeding roses, despite their ephemerality, is a savage
process. For every three or four new roses that finally make it
into the company’s catalog, around 80,000 others will have
fallen by the wayside during the eight-year trialing process.

As well as pleasing the eye and tantalizing the nose, they
must be pest-resistant.

Those pests aren’t always who you’d expect. In Albrighton,
Austin’s peacocks have acquired a taste for the buds. Or perhaps
they’re simply bored of being upstaged. At his Japanese office,
it’s wild boars that have been running amok in the densely
planted beds.

As he tells it in the latest edition of his best-selling
book, “David Austin’s English Roses,” the rose has always held
a special place in gardeners’ hearts. It was prized medicinally
as well as ornamentally by the ancients, and has been used as a
religious, historic and political emblem around the globe.

Rosy Romance

Of course, roses are also intensely romantic.

“It’s funny, I never quite liked the word romantic,”
Austin says. “It suggests something that’s purely in your head,
as if the object itself isn’t very beautiful.” If ever he had
given flowers to his late wife, Pat, she would have wondered
what he’d done wrong.

If he weren’t breeding roses, he would probably be driving
a combine harvester, he says. In his tweed jacket and plaid
shirt, he certainly dresses the part of the gentleman farmer. He
has the manner, too -- modest and sparely spoken, with a
thoroughly unsentimental respect for nature.

While he speaks of his roses like children - “You can see
the parents in them” -- he certainly doesn’t talk to them like
Prince Charles advocates.

When I ask whether an eye for beauty is something he’s had
to cultivate, he smiles coyly. “I think I was always a bit that
way. I was dyslexic and the one thing I could do was draw.”

Breeding plants is more of an art than a science, he says.
Pollination is even done with a paintbrush. What science there
is seems decidedly low-tech. In a greenhouse made tropical by a
hissing humidifier, clothes pegs prove crucial to the grafting
process.

Pinks, Peaches

Elsewhere, workers extract seeds by pummeling the hips with
wooden mallets, thumping along to a radio that plays R&B. The
cut-flower testing shed looks like an art gallery, its white
benches lined with beakers, a single pink, peach, or yellow stem
in each.

Marriott’s official duties include -- yes -- smelling the
roses. On a tour of the garden, he casually beheads samples,
shaking water from them like umbrellas before burying his nose
in their petals, twirling them slightly beforehand as if
preparing to taste wine.

Their scents encompass musk and tea, guava and lychee, and
the gray sky makes their colors pop, myriad shades on every
bush. The closer you look, the more variance you see. Here is
the Kew Gardens rose with just five petals to each bloom, over
there the Spirit of Freedom, which packs as many as 200.

There are aspects of the business that irk Austin. Picking
the name of a rose, for instance, is “absolute murder.” Yet he
doesn’t envisage retiring for another decade, if then. As he
puts it, “There’s no end to beauty.”

“The English Roses” is published by Conran (320 pages, 30
pounds). “David Austin’s English Roses: Glorious New Roses for
American Gardens” (160 pages, $9.95) is published by Little
Brown. To buy the book in North America, click here.